NGOs take distorted data to court to ask police for restrictions

Summary of this report:

• NGOs leading an offensive in the STF to reduce police operations in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro submit reports to Justice with distorted data, produced by the NGOs themselves and by groups of political militancy, to convince judges.
• In addition to NGOs, research groups that position themselves as technicians also create reports to feed the “anti-police” narrative of non-governmental entities.
• A report by one of these research groups, which is funded with public funds, makes a political manifesto and endorses the hypothesis of a “jacarezinho massacre”, which has already been discarded by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Justice Department.
• The action in the STF, conducted by NGOs and left-wing political parties, has already been responsible for imposing several obstacles to the presence of the police in communities, causing irreparable damage to public safety.

NGOs that in the last three years have been dedicated to a crusade in the Judiciary and in the press to reduce police operations in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro have a common strategy: the use of supposedly technical reports, but with distorted data about the complex scenario of violence in the state to support requests to the Justice for more restrictions on the presence of the police in the communities. In parallel, such reports have also been used to influence debates on the subject in the press and academia and even to support government programs.

One of these cases occurred at the launch of the National Program for Public Security with Citizenship (Pronasci) by the Lula government in March of this year. According to Minister of Justice and Public Security Flávio Dino, a report by the NGO Redes da Maré with distorted data on violence in Complexo da Maré was one of the bases for the program, which ignored the fight against organized crime.

Redes da Maré is very active in the records of the so-called “ADPF das Favelas” (ADPF 635) – a lawsuit that is being processed by the STF in which NGOs, political parties and the Public Defender of Rio de Janeiro have been successfully pleading a series of restrictions to police operations in communities dominated by drug trafficking. For experts, the measure has generated serious damage to public safety in the state.

In the case file before the STF, Redes da Maré usually presents, together with other entities, data from similar reports, produced by the NGOs themselves, to corroborate a supposed urgency to substantially reduce operations.

The methods of these entities are clear: a) using official data together with unofficial data, supposedly collected by the NGOs themselves from residents, to point out the security forces as the cause of violence in the state; b) ignore the broad dominance of factions linked to drug trafficking in communities; c) make a strong defense of the “ADPF das Favelas” asking for more and more restrictions on the presence of the police.

Institute releases political manifesto under the label of research reports

In the company of NGOs are research groups dedicated to left-wing political activism, which generate a series of reports with technical guises to fuel the “anti-police” narrative of the entities. One of these is the New Illegalism Study Group (Geni), linked to the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).

To the STF, NGOs usually mention data from Geni bulletins to support requests for the removal of security forces from communities. Recently, data created by the institute was also used by the Public Defender of Rio de Janeiro in an official document to request changes in the conduct of public security in the state.

In early May, Geni released an allegedly technical report, but in the tone of a political manifesto. The title: “Police massacres in Rio de Janeiro: Nationalization of deaths, mega police massacres and impunity”. In the opinion, the group calls all police operations in which there were more than three deaths as a result of armed confrontation as “slaughter”, without analyzing the contexts of each episode.

In communities dominated by criminal factions, security agents are usually met with great armed resistance when making incursions to fulfill arrest warrants, for example. The attacks include guerrilla tactics, the use of various explosives and military equipment used only by the armed forces. In these cases, the security forces often react with shots to clear the resistance of drug traffickers, which inevitably leads to the victimization of criminals and police, in addition to, in smaller numbers, innocent residents.

Despite this, the document does not contain an analysis of the content of police actions – whether they were legitimate, derived from the armed resistance of drug traffickers, or whether they were criminal. Instead, the document says that 3.3% of police operations carried out in Rio de Janeiro between 2007 and 2022 were police killings.

Authors of the report preach the thesis of the “jacarezinho slaughter”, already discarded by the MP and the Justice

In an effort to defend a narrative, the authors of the Geni study on “slaughter” resume the thesis of the “jacarezinho slaughter”, which was widely explored after the police operation carried out in that community in May 2021, which resulted in 28 deaths after an extensive confrontation between police officers. and drug traffickers.

Far from any technical rigor, the group treats the episode as a “massacre” carried out by the police and dedicates the report so that “this massacre will never be forgotten, that its perpetrators be held accountable and that massacres like these stop happening again”. “To date, none of the police officers responsible for the massacre has been legally held responsible, nor has there been any reparation action by the State”, say the authors of the opinion.

Despite this, the occurrence of abuses by police officers was ruled out in 26 of the 27 deaths of suspected criminal activities by the task force of the state Public Prosecutor’s Office and/or by the Justice. In a note sent to People’s Gazette in July of last year, the Public Prosecutor’s Office stated that in these cases “no evidence was found capable of indicating the commission of a crime by the police in the related cases, with a conclusion for deaths resulting from armed confrontation”.

Of the three complaints made by the Public Ministry in relation to those involved in the confrontation, the Justice accepted only two: one against two police officers for alleged intentional homicide and procedural fraud in relation to one of the deaths, and the other against drug dealers responsible for the death of a civil police officer. during the operation. This Thursday (25), the Court of Justice of Rio de Janeiro confirmed that the police officers included in the Public Ministry’s complaint acted in self-defense.

A People’s Gazette requested information from Geni’s coordination about the research methodology and the mechanisms used to preserve impartiality and technical rigor in the preparation of publicly funded opinions on topics sensitive to public security. So far there has been no return.

Reports use data from other NGO opinions to reinforce narratives

The origin of some of the data indicated in the Geni survey comes from reports produced by NGOs that also participate in the group of political activism entities against ADPF 635. In one of the excerpts, the opinion mentions a survey carried out by the collective of NGOs called Observatório Cidade Integrada , headed by the Institute for the Defense of the Black Population (IDPN), which integrates the action in the STF.

The bulletin mentions that 70% of residents of the Jacarezinho neighborhood would have reported that they felt insecure with the presence of the police in the neighborhood. The research was published in August 2022, seven months after the beginning of the Cidade Integrada program, by the government of Rio de Janeiro, which provided for a greater police presence in communities. Still according to the study, 50% of the residents of the neighborhood would have said that they had had their homes violated by police officers without a court order since the beginning of the program.

Estimates by the association of community residents indicate that there are 80,000 residents in Jacarezinho. In practice, according to the NGO, in just seven months, 40,000 people would have had their homes invaded by police, that is, no less than 190 daily invasions. If materialized, the numbers would completely make it impossible for the police to operate in the program, who would dedicate themselves exclusively to “invasions”.

According to IDPN, the survey was made from simple questions to residents. Despite the fragility of the report, the numbers were exhaustively used in major press vehicles, which led to an official note from the state government with criticism: “The report released by the Cidade Integrada Observatory makes a series of assertions without citing sources and evidence, which which makes it impossible to support the arguments indicated. The document does not offer a theoretical framework or bibliography, disqualifying it as scientific research.”

The government even mentioned another discrepancy: in a survey carried out by Datafolha before the start of the program, 59% of respondents responded that they were in favor of Cidade Integrada. The NGO report pointed out that only 1% was satisfied with the program a few months after its inception.

In the May report, Geni also says that a large number of homicides in Rio de Janeiro are committed by police officers on duty, “a phenomenon that has been called nationalization of deaths”. Despite the given scientific guise, it was the Security Observatory Network, formed by seven NGOs that have the same political discourse of less police presence in the communities, who created the term in another bulletin released last year.

The network coordinator is a political scientist dedicated to left-wing political activism. Among the sources of the referred study that originated the “phenomenon of nationalization of deaths” are “four printed journals”, “a dozen websites and online portals” and “more than a hundred Twitter accounts”. No official body is named as the source of the survey.

Restrictions on the police have caused obvious harm to residents, says MP prosecutor

Marcelo Rocha Monteiro, public prosecutor of the Public Ministry of Rio de Janeiro (MPRJ), points out that there are serious consequences in presenting data from partial entities as being technical to convince the Justice in decisions related to public security.

The prosecutor explains that there are serious impacts on residents of the state, especially communities, since the beginning of the restrictions imposed by the STF. One of them, according to Monteiro, is that criminals from other states, especially linked to drug trafficking, began to migrate to Rio de Janeiro because they saw that restrictions on the police made it a safer place to command crimes. Another consequence pointed out by Monteiro is that factions began to strengthen their domains by building barriers to prevent access by police vehicles.

“The barriers were improvised works, but since the ADPF they have become real works of engineering, since criminals can now build them calmly in daylight, since the police are prohibited from being regularly present in these places” , says the prosecutor.

“It is important to highlight that these built barriers prevent access not only by police vehicles, but by any vehicle, such as service providers and even ambulances. In other words, only those allowed by organized crime enter the communities, with obvious damage to the residents”, he declares.